CRASH! How I Lost a Hundred Billion and Found True Love (Kindle Single)

by Julian Gough

The UK Kindle Single #1 hit.

Jude lives in a henhouse with no roof, that he bought for ten million euro, at the height of the Irish property bubble. One day, his mortgage is rated the debt in Europe most likely to default... The political and financial elite of Europe arrive, with a plan: help Jude put a roof on his henhouse, stabilize his debt, and reassure the markets. It all goes horribly wrong.

"This novella is very funny – laugh-out-loud at times…Gough is one of our most talented satirists" — The Irish Independent

Jude in London

by Julian Gough

Shortlisted for both the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, Jude in London is an epic, comic exploration of the bizarre love triangle between language, consciousness, and reality. Which is all very well, if you're into that sort of thing.

Jude: Level 1

by Julian Gough

Shortlisted for the 2008 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.

The novel's prologue won the biggest prize in the world for a single short story - the BBC National Short Story Prize.

"Sheer comic brilliance" - The Times

"The best comic novel I've ever read" - Tommy Tiernan

"Could be the finest comic novel since Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman" - The Sunday Tribune

Juno and Juliet

by Julian Gough

My first novel, of which I am very fond. The adventures of teenage twin sisters Juno & Juliet, in their first year away from home. Life, love and literature, in Galway and Tipperary.

"Like Roddy Doyle in an extremely good mood" - The Washington Post

"A modern, at times brilliantly ironic reworking of the classical fairytale, with nods to Shakespeare, Austen and Beckett." - Literary Review

Here (hot from my inbox!) is a sneak preview of an illustration, and a chapter, from Jude in London (due to be published in September). In the picture, Jude is about to find out if he has won the greatest prize in art - the Turner of Turners. The crowd lift him aloft... his former lover, Babette, flips a golden coin...

No, I won't tell you who is sneaking up behind him with a gun.

For now, clicking on the picture takes you to the first book. Which is also excellent.

And here's some free new book to go with the picture. This is from a little earlier on, before the prize ceremony... Enjoy...

I entered Tate Modern. The floor sloped away and down, beneath a high walkway, and out into one enormous Room. I walked for a long time, until I was in the centre of the Room, and looked around. I was obviously very early, for the Art had not arrived yet. Certainly there was more than enough blank space on the walls for it. It was a room into which you could have fitted Galway City’s great Car Park of the Roaches itself. I had never seen the like. Its scale was inhuman. Yet the Tate Family evidently still lived here, and spent all their time in this room, for their possessions lay all about me. At the far end of the room, and proof I was in the right place, a stage stood before a backdrop of vast, dead television screens. Great lights, unlit as yet, hung above the stage from steel beams.

No doubt the Prize-Giving will take place upon that stage. Oh, I hope they will not be too disappointed that I have neglected to create any Art …

Perhaps I could make up for my failure by helping to get the place ready, before the other artists’ Art arrived. I looked all about me.

There was very little furniture in the room, and that in bad order. The bed in the far left corner was in most need of attention, the sheets crumpled and filthy. The last party had obviously congregated here, for on the bed, the rug, and the surrounding floor, were empty cigarette packets, stubbed butts, vodka bottles and general debris.

Ceci n'est pas un litIt was an easy matter to collect the rubbish, turn the mattress, shake out the sheets, plump the pillows, and remake the bed. This ritual, familiar to me from the Orphanage, soothed. I sang softly as I worked. Too soft a sound to rebound in echo from the bare walls.

The fish tank proved trickier than the bed. Enormous though the tank was, the fish was far too big for it. I estimated the poor creature at thirty-five feet. Presumably, in the way of family pets, it had simply outgrown its accommodation. The older Tate children, who loved it, had themselves, I supposed, reached adolescence, and become too busy to care for it: and the aging parents slowly forgot it, in its forty foot tank in the far right corner. It appeared to have been dead for some time. Bubbles of decomposition rocked it occasionally in the thickening water, as they emerged from the decaying grey flesh. The top of the tank was sealed, which cannot have been healthy for the fish while it lived. Certainly, it made my task of emptying and cleaning the tank more difficult than it needed to be.

Ceci n'est pas un poissonWhen I was finally done with the fish tank, I examined the room in more detail. The place was in a shocking state. The closer I looked, the more shocked I was. The very basics of child-rearing seemed to have been neglected by the Tate parents. Neither the young Tate children nor their many pets seemed to have been adequately toilet trained. There were lumps of elephant dung everywhere. Some had even stuck to the paintings, and dried there. It was a hell of a job to get it all off.

The children themselves seemed to go anywhere. I even found a bottle of urine with a crucifix in it. Sighing, I retrieved our Lord Jesus on his cross, and hung him back up on a clean wall.

I began to clean the handprints and splashes of dried mud off the end wall.

As I worked, others quietly entered the enormous room. Some introduced themselves to me, and shook my hand.

I finished cleaning the wall, and looked around. Still a great deal of work to do, to get the place ready … Unbelievable that a family as rich as the Tates lived in such squalor. Nothing seemed to work. I decided to fix the fluorescent light, which had been flickering erratically since I’d arrived. I tracked the fault to a hidden timer that someone had mistakenly set to turn the light on and off again every minute or so. It was a simple matter to route the circuit around it.

Even their big, new, colour television seemed broken. I couldn’t get any sound out of it. It was showing a rather dull film, about a woman trying to clean a shower. The pictures had gone very slow for some reason, and were in black and white. The whole thing seemed banjaxed. I switched it off.

Then I picked up some old firebricks, which had been left lying where someone might trip. Gasps came from the shadows. Brian Sewell clapped.

I put the firebricks in an old, water-damaged shed. Its overlapping boards and weathered paint reminded me of the lakeboats of Lough Derg. A pleasing warm feeling rose in me.

Now to deal with the graffiti.

The older Tate children seemed to have thrown several parties recently, without the benefit of parental supervision. Many of their friends had scrawled their names, and worse, across all kinds of objects and surfaces. I set to scrubbing. An illiterate fellow called Chris, from County Offaly, seemed to be one of the worst offenders. I was sad to see a fellow Irishman letting the side down. “Ofili” indeed.

Tired, and in need of a break after removing the graffiti, I looked for the toilet facilities. A urinal was mounted in the centre of the room. It was mounted at a curious height, and on its back: but no doubt that was the modern way. Oh, more fecking graffiti… On its rim someone had scribbled their name, and the date or time of the party. R. Mutt. 1917? 19.17? 7.17pm? I carefully scraped it off, before urinating.

Reader Comments (3)

Ah, it was Serrano's "Piss Christ" tipped you off? (Of course, his is a photo, but I've put the original piece on exhibit...) I was going to ask people to tell me, at what point did they realise what was going on? But when I decided to add in some photos of Britart here, I assumed they would tip people off, so there was no point in asking.

When I write these scenes (where there's some kind of gap between what Jude's doing and what he thinks he's doing), I always assume everyone will get every reference, but I've learned over the years that remarkably few readers visualise a scene independently. Most trust and accept the narrator's description. I'd imagine a UK audience will get it very early on, though (the shark's a roaring giveaway - in the UK, Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is tabloid shorthand for contemporary art).

Fascinating, though, to see an American reader being tipped off by the American artwork, and not by the earlier British ones... I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!

Loved this, can't wait to read the book. I didn't get a 'gotcha' moment as I recognized your description of the artworks (and then the pictures are a dead giveaway), but the idea of the 'defacing' (or 'reclaiming'?) these works as a performance piece, only the performer doesn't realize? :)